The transmission and reception of video data over various media is ever increasing. In some use cases, such as ultra-low latency use cases, latency is a big issue. In these use cases, the delay resulting from encoding the entire frame before transmission is not acceptable as latency is a critical parameter in functionality and user experience. Consequently, whatever video data that has been encoded has to be sent immediately. Therefore, a major requirement for these ultra-low latency use cases or applications is to increase network efficiency by packing as many macroblocks as possible within an encoded video slice, while considering given constraints on maximum slice size as well as quality.